Bracketing Modality

Abstract

10.1 Husserl’s version of transcendental subjectivism—Challenging the self-evidence of Descartes’ ego—Factual recognitions and ontological claims: suspending all non-self-evident claims, including modal ones—Being as an appearance of validity—The decisive maintenance of the phenomenological suspension—Our natural connectionism seems to undermine a complete bracketing. 10.2 Beyond the Cartesian-Kantian “I think”: phenomenology as the study of the stream of consciousness—What distinguishes it from a contextualist epistemology—The Husserlian insistence on modality—The notion of “as if” applied to perceptive, retentive and recollective states—Explaining as-if experiences by means of faults and fictionalizations—Modal issues at the core of Husserl’s concerns: “certainty of being” as stubbornly present. 10.3 Intentionality—How awareness is impregnated by otherness—The world and our intentional activities—Is an interdependent relationship sound?—External things as things meant—The spectrum of Husserl’s self-repudiated psychologism. 10.4 Imaginative and suppositional capacities: Husserl after Aristotle on phantasy—The rationale of our thinking through images that are anchored to a hypoleptic background—Aquinas’ misunderstanding of the Aristotelian doctrine of supposition—Pros and cons of Husserl’s immanent philosophy—Hermberg’s and Beyer’s readings: a “lifeworldly” contextualism?